From January, 2004.
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Strafe Left: The Formative Years #13
Posted by Tim Stone on January 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm.
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lol Thats a great Strafe Left comic. I was very disappointed they left Strafe Left out of the new issue. Heres hoping it’ll be back next month
Nooo! It’s been replaced by a longer oddball section (which is good mind, but doesn’t deserve to be stamped over good old strafe left) so that there can be a bigger advert on that page. Damn you Saitek cyborg 5.1 headset! Daaamn yoooooou!
On a less silly note, great strafe left.
I hadn’t noticed that Strafe Left was missing. But now I do, I have a sense of outrage! How dare PC Gamer remove Strafe Left! Grr! etc.
Best episode ever!
Yeah, I’d love to know why it was missing, I hope it was only temporary.. it has grown to be the first thing I turn to every time I get the magazine.
What game’s this then? :s
I laughed, but not because of this comic.
Max said
What game’s this then?
It’s satire you [wonderful man].
“I’d love to know why it was missing, I hope it was only temporary..”
Sadly not.
To cut a long story short, last month’s cartoon (the TF2 history of the Twentieth Century one) had a run-in with the PC Gamer censor. A number of elements deemed potentially offensive to a “significant number of readers” were removed. I strongly disagreed with the action, and pulled the plug on SL partly in protest and partly because I realised I couldn’t put my heart and soul into future cartoons knowing they might be mutilitated by a ridiculously timid censor.
Apologies to SL ‘fans’ (all five of you). Thanks for all the encouraging forum comments over the years. Hopefully the strip will find a new, more sympathetic home soon.
That’s a pain in the arse. Fair balls for “sticking it to the man” though. Any chance we’ll see an uncensored version of the strip in question? :D
well, geez…… wonder who’d pick it up? its a tough sell…..
*cough cough*
Yes! It must be a regular feature on here! Like it… already… is…
@Tim: That’s a shame. It could be hit and miss at times, but it has provided me with numerous chuckles and guffaws over the years.
Quality.
WHAT?!? I thought that TF2 comic was the smartest, funniest, most satirical SL with the greatest number of belly laughs per square inch that I’ve seen in PC Gamer.
Can we slap the censor, please? >.>
I thought that strip was excellent, essentially every single time I saw it. Look forward to seeing it elsewhere. Go hang out with Zeropunctuation at the Escapist.
“It’s satire you [wonderful man].”
Yeah, nice one :/
I’m sort of used to these comics parodying one game or another, and when I couldn’t spot a specific theme in this one I assumed it must have been a game I hadn’t played. I was wrong, and after another read of the comic after your wonderfully helpful comment I understand the joke.
Thanks for making me feel welcome here though; nice job.
“Apologies to SL ‘fans’ (all five of you).”
Ahh, don’t be so modest Tim, I’m sure there are at least 12 of us =)
So, did you post the TF2 “to be censored” comic or did I miss that?
I don’t comment on them but they are not bad, and artistically I let them off :) – a good contrast to the ultra-super-graphics of the games they usually represent.
Why not make new ones for RPS? I mean, unless you have a censor here :(
@Andrew: The censored comic hasn’t been posted up on RPS, but it did appear in the last isssue (183) of PCG UK.
Fair enough – I suppose it was censored, I’d love to know what, and see them both. I mean, if a mere comic is censored, what else can we assume is? :(
The uncensored version of the TF2 cartoon will probably appear in the archive eventually. Probably not for a while though. I’m trying to inter the older stuff first. (For hygiene reasons, obviously).
You’ll then need to start making new ones! :o
:D
Good that you’ll get it online. A side-by-side-comparison would be neat, since I personally abhor censorship.
Any chance of the “Mature themes” – “Strong Language” one being up in the not too distant future? I’d quite like it as wallpaper.
(Sorry if I sound a bit like the guy at a gig shouting “Freebird! Play your old shit, man!”)
I find this passing hilarious from a magazine where a slight mis-reading of an url (1ZOOX for 1Z0OX, and the font really doesn’t help with that distincting) sends the reader to an amateur porn site rather than the homepage for UT Tweaker.
Ah well, sorry to see Strafe Left go at any rate, one of my favourite parts.
I love strafe left.
Was it more or less censorship-worthy than some of the games that were advertised in that issue, I wonder.